When I was at the height of my sugar addiction I was with my sisters and daughters in Ashland, Oregon for the Shakespeare Festival. We had stopped at the local chocolate store before a play.  My sister, Gigi and I each bought the same thing and while we were eating it she said, “It’s too rich!” I thought [...]

“He who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking will never accomplish anything.” Martin Luther If you want to banish belly fat, you’ve got to do something fairly counter intuitive: eat. Research shows that dieting too intensely or tracking every morsel too closely creates the perfect conditions for adding belly fat, not subtracting it. A [...]

Every human being is the author of his own health or disease.  -Buddha Back in the late 80’s when the “fat free” weight loss trend was just starting to get a good hold my sister-in-law said to me, “Fat makes you fat.  You can’t get enough fat out of your diet.”  It sounded so logical [...]

  LEAN for LIFE – Welcome to FitMania’s 90 day Challenge Final Week What kind of personal progress did you make? Congratulations on accepting FitMania’s LEAN for LIFE challenge!  The LEAN for LIFE challenge will start a whole new chapter in your life if you will be committed to it for these three months.  Just [...]

The best kept secret to losing weight is to eat.  For decades we have thought to lose weight you had to eat less. That is a bad idea.  If it worked everyone would be thin because everyone has tried cutting calories at least once right? The real secret is not how much you eat but [...]

One of the keys to weight loss and over all fitness is to eat, eat, eat! Being hungry is bad. When we get hungry we are more likely to reach for the wrong things.  Especially if we are busy.  It is important to eat just before you are hungry.  That means we eat 5 – [...]

Unless you have had your head buried in a Big Gulp you probably already know that there are a litany of reasons why soda is bad for you. It’s nothing but sugar water. It’s devoid of any nutritional value. It leads to obesity and diabetes.  Here are things you might not know. Drinking non-diet soda [...]

“All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.”  -Helen Keller “Gluten free”  labels are popping up every where and you might be asking yourself what it means and if you are missing out on some big new solution to all your dietary problems. The truth is that you might be, [...]

“All of us are self-made, but only the successful are willing to admit it.”   Earl Nightingale All food falls into one of the three macronutrients :  protein, carbohydrates or fats.  Today’s topic is protein, whey protein in particular, but I want to be clear about carbohydrates first.  Vegetables are carbohydrates as well as fruits and [...]

  Diets* don’t work.  We know it and yet they are ubiquitous.  It seems that every other person you know is dieting and the book stores always have a new program on display.   Let’s look at why they don’t work and offer an easier alternative. Main Reason Diets Don’t Work:  Going without enough food is like [...]

“Nothing great has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances.” – Bruce Barton 1. DO NOT DIET!  Finding and maintaining a healthy weight is not about eating less, it’s about eating more—more nutrition-dense food, to crowd out the empty calories and keep you full all [...]

Dieting? One of every four pounds you lose is probably muscle. Studies show that this is what happens to people who just cut calories as well as people who cut calories and do cardio exercise (you know, walking, running, cycling, hiking, etc). Not dieting? You still may be losing muscle. Adults lose 1/4 – 1/2 [...]

“Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.” -Charles Simmons On my website I say, “Society has given us a wealth of knowledge on health, weight & fitness while obscuring the answers we are looking for.”  Here is a sample of the misconceptions that make me craziest.  Lie # 1  If [...]

  Eating is the way to lose weight.   We are designed to eat! It seems counter intuitive in our dieting society but eating is not what makes people fat and dieting is NOT the way to lose weight.  The popularity of diets is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic.  With each round of dieting muscle is lost [...]

My friend has a glass cookie jar with a loose fitting lid and a few left over sugar cookies.  These cookies are 13 years old and look exactly the way they did the day they were bought.  Not even mold or insects wants them.  If you put a carrot, or egg or chicken breast in [...]